-=> CHARLES ANGELICH wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-

 CA> I don't trust the machine to manage well in 'power saver' mode.

A feeling with quite a bit of justified concern in my experience.

 WC>  I do have the monitor powered down in Win 98 but the
 WC>  system sleep mode is invoked in CMOS.
 WC>  Don't ask me why but any other combinations cause lockups
 WC>  and problems.

 CA> I can live without the 'help' of any automated "turner-offer". ;-)

 Well my current settings give no trouble and the monitor being
 2 1/2 feet to the left of my head I like the screen blanking
 rather than a night light.
 Rather like leaving the filiment lit to cut down on thermal shock.

 WC> But just before I gave up I entered the proper figures into
 WC> CMOS and booted with my LINUX rescue disk and lo and behold
 WC> Knoppix came right up with no problem whatsoever!

 CA> That CMOS was affected seems to point to some sort of power glitch
 CA> rather than software related (not a Windows glitch).

Can't be the CMOS battery, brand new and tested good.
Battery holder is secure as well.
Only the primary 0 hard drive setting was affected, everything else held.

 CA> KNOPPIX is read/only. Hard to trash that. :-)                 e

 CA> You can only trash the file system that is in-use when the glitch
 CA> happens.  I'm assuming that you weren't using Linux at that time.

 WC> Yeah but why was the C drive not recognized in any way
 WC> except through booting Linux and mounting it there where all
 WC> looked well? It is a puzzlement.

 CA> CMOS was trashed you said?  Windows uses CMOS, Linux does not.

Yeah, set CMOS, rebooted from Linux emergency boot disk
and it worked fine.
Only primary drive 0 setting was showing "none", everything else
was OK.
Weird as it's set to "user" instead of autodetect.
Rebooted to the Windows rescue disk and that's when everything
turned to crud.
Windows 3.1 never did this sort of thing to me!!!

 WC> Mounted /dev/hda1 /mnt and had a look around and
 WC> the files and directories on the 98 FAT 32 partition
 WC> looked fine.

 CA> A marginal voltage from the power supply?  Could be the
 CA> refrigerator kicking in and temporarily dropping the
 CA> wattage to a marginal power supply?

 WC>  The computer is by design on a completely separate leg
 WC>  of my wiring and has a surge protector.
 WC>  AC, refridgerator and microwave are on different circuits.
 WC>  Load on this leg is at at MOST 400 watts with no inductive
 WC> components.

 CA> Electro-static shock at the wrong time in the wrong place?  I had
 CA> something like this from a loose power cord not shoved into the
 CA> back of the machine tightly.

The multiple self restarting passes through scanreg was expecially
vexing to me.
It remains a puzzlement.
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5